Bicycle Friendly Community
Last week, we announced the latest round of Bicycle Friendly Communities. Chicago, IL is one of the 42 new and renewing communities this round, and the Silver-level community has made a lot of strides since the last application period four years ago. We caught up with Ron Burke, the executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance in Chicago, to talk about where the Windy City has improved and where it still needs a lot of work to be a truly bicycle-friendly place.
This week, we announced the latest round of Bicycle Friendly Communities. Louisville, KY, is one of the 42 new and renewing communities this round, and the new Silver-level community is aiming to be the best in the region. We caught up with John “Rolf” Eisinger, the city’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, and with Chris Glasser, President of Bicycling for Louisville, to talk more about what this award means to the city and where they will go from here to reach Gold!
This week, we announced the latest round of Bicycle Friendly Communities. Memphis, TN, is one of the 42 new and renewing communities this round, and the new Bronze-level community is aiming to be the best in all of Tennessee. The effort has been spearheaded from many angles, including the city government and a robust advocacy group. We caught up with Kyle Wagenschutz, the city’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, and with John Paul Shaffer, Program Director at Livable Memphis, to talk more about what this award means to the city and where they will go from here to reach Silver!
Today the League of American Bicyclists announced 42 new and renewing Bicycle Friendly Communities (BFC). With this new round, 69 million people live in a Bicycle Friendly Community. These new awardees join a leading group of more than 350 communities in all 50 states that are improving health, safety and quality of life in cities and towns nationwide.
Imagine: It’s the year 2020. In Fort Collins, Colorado, one in every five people travels by bike — and there are zero bicycle-related fatalities. The foundation for achieving this vision, set forth in the city’s 2014 Bicycle Master Plan, is a low-stress bicycling network: a comfortable, safe and connected system of world-class bicycle infrastructure, accessible to all residents and visitors, aged 8 to 80.
I think we can all agree: Movement is essential to the human condition… Americans, especially American drivers in the Frontier, like to believe they are free to move, but I have found free and equal mobility to be a myth. Some are in charge of it. Some are excluded or even imprisoned by it.
In 2013, the City of Richfield became the first suburb in Minnesota to be awarded the Bicycle Friendly Community designation in Minnesota. We’ve since been joined by our neighboring City of Edina but I’m still often asked by staff and bike advocates in other suburban cities: What are the key issues we should focus on to become a more bicycle friendly suburban community?
Growing up, cycling all over Dublin city center on the thousand-year-old narrow streets I never imagined another life, decades later, bicycling around the northern Virginia suburbs. This isn’t to say you won’t find me ferrying teenagers around in my minivan, but when I can I use my bike instead. It’s fast and it’s cheap and just seems like a nicer way to encounter the world. But nowadays when I bike, many aspects of how and where I ride differ greatly from back in my Dublin days — because of the suburban location.
This Friday during our weekly Twitter chat, #BikeChat, we asked the question, “What does a Bicycle Friendly Community look like to you?” Bicycle Friendly Communities come in all shapes and sizes. In one you might ride past a dairy farm, with nothing but green ahead of you, and in the next you might be stopping at a bike-specific red light within a two-way cycle track on a busy city block. We work with community leaders in neighborhoods big or small, sprawling or compact, densely or sparsely populated, and everything in between.
What do Portland and Boulder have in common? They are, of course, both considered among the most bike-friendly places in the United States — including by the League. They are two of just four Platinum level communities in our Bicycle Friendly Community program. And in recent years, both communities have dropped the ball when it comes to addressing the needs of, and providing opportunities for, mountain bikers. Boulder has opened the excellent Valmont Park facility recently, but in both cities, there are large swathes of prime mountain biking venues that are declared out of bounds, for no good reason. The local mountain bike community feels unfairly shut out, despite going to great lengths to go through the appropriate channels, follow the process, be part of planning meetings, hearings, studies etc.